Mars needs women, Vermont needs taxpayers

Mars may need women, at least according to the 1967 sci-fi B movie, “Mars Needs Women”, but Vermont needs more young people and middle-class families — that is, more people paying taxes and fees.

In the campy sci-fi movie, NASA decodes a desperate message from deep space: “Mars ... Needs ... Women”. It turns out the fanciful Martians in the movie have a genetic deficiency that produces only male offspring. But in the case of Vermont, the deficiency isn’t in the DNA, it’s in the state tax coffers.

With news stories about Vermont’s young people leaving the state in search of better-paying jobs, so, too, has its middle class begun to shrink.

For example, 64 percent of Vermont’s high school grads go out of state for college, and many never return.

Between 2000 and 2010 — during the governorships of Democrat Howard Dean and Republican Jim Douglas — Vermonters between the ages of 25 and 45 declined by 30,000.

Things didn’t improve much under Democrat Gov. Peter Shumlin.

As Gov. Phil Scott awarned while lieutenant governor when his statewide “Everyday Jobs Initiative” hit the road, such losses erode the state’s tax base and scare away new businesses. (Aside: as part of his initiative, then Lt. Gov. Scott spent a day on the job as an eager advertising salesperson at the Vermont Eagle in 2011.)

“Those losses [are] making Vermont less and less affordable for those who remain,” Scott said at an address last January.

During the 2016 campaign, Scott said he’d like to see Vermont’s population expand from 625,000 to 700,000 over the next decade. Is increasing the number of natives and flatlanders an attainable goal?

“This is a pretty tall order — maybe unattainable,” said Rob Roper, president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a free-market think tank. “Our state’s population is stagnant, and if we want to be able to continue paying for government services, we need to find a way to increase the number of citizens paying taxes into the treasury.”